The Fabian socialists are having their “Causes to Fight For” conference today. A rally of freedom hating statists who will throw soundbites to a tweeting mob. For over a hundred years the Fabians have tried to increase the power of the state at the expense of society. If there is one consistent aim from the time of the Webbs, through from Oswald Mosley up to Sunder Katawala today, it is to undermine a free, property owning society. Fabians realise socialism will never triumph as long as people have capital and independence.

For most people their single biggest asset, and society’s bulwark against socialism, is their family home. It is why socialists want penal inheritance taxes and opposed letting low income families get on the property ladder. Council house sales turned former state dependents into property owners, promoting upward mobility and vote switching from a Labour Party which wanted to keep them as clients, to parties which encouraged popular aspirations. Even today Fabians still want to extend state socialism further at the expense of home ownership. The past hundred years of the Fabians have had even darker times too.

In preparation for their Challenging Extremism session at the conference, Sunder Katawala wrote a not unjustified diatribe against the Daily Mail for historically endorsing the Blackshirts. Very thin ice for a Fabian to be on given that the Blackshirts were founded by a leading Fabian – Oswald Mosley.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century the Fabians were the biggest advocates of eugenics. Leading Fabians and founders of the LSE, Sidney and Beatrice Webb believed “What we as eugenicists have got to do is to ‘scrap’ the old Poor Law with its indiscriminate relief of the destitute as such and replace it by an intelligent policy of so altering the social environment as to discourage or prevent the multiplication of those irrevocably below the National Minimum of Fitness.” In the 1930s Archibald Church introduced a bill for eugenic sterilization to stop “those who are in every way a burden to their parents, a misery to themselves and in my opinion a menace to the social life of the community” from reproducing. Church was a Fabian.

Prominent Fabians such as H G Wells, Bernard Shaw and the Webbs led the way in combining the ‘progressive’ ideologies of socialism and eugenics. It doesn’t stop there either. As The Guardian reported last year the “Fabian socialists provided the intellectual justification for the eugenics policy that led to the stolen generations scandal.” For a century the Fabians have sought and sadly often succeeded in undermining the traditional family, property rights and individual freedom. Their cause is evil.